I’m going to be taking a 2 week vacation – RubyAMF will get no love until I’m back. I know there are a couple issues open in email – I’m really sorry guys, however I really need this break. As soon as I get back I’ll finish 1.3.4 for everyone.
And I’d like to finally announce that I’ll be at MAX. Can’t wait 
. I don’t know my schedule yet, I’m just gonna wing it. I’ll for sure be at Flex on Rails given by Tony Hillerson on Monday.
Maybe I’ll see you there!
A quick note that /trunk of the svn repository is for “development.” Every once and a while I’ll commit stuff that is a work in progress, meaning it will probably break whatever you’re building. So please use /tags for the current version available. They’re are quite a few tags you can use. I’ve gotten into the habbit of puttings tags for every release, they are structured like so: “release_x.x.x_revxxx”. So whatever the greatest one is – is always the latest. Sorry to kill those dreams of being on RubyAMF edge. 
Sorry for the dely in the wiki updates. Just been cranking on some other stuff. So here’s the deal. The first wiki I feel didn’t get a lot of information across. Most people wouldn’t read it. So the wiki is now my open effort for a book which I’ve now dubbed the wooki, It’s necessarily going to be published, maybe someday .
I feel a wiki in the form of a book will help get a lot of information across. Better than just random pieces of information. So, here is the first proposed index of the book. I’d love some feedback, and maybe let me know if there are any glaring holes. My schedule to get this all written is 3 months. That’s somewhat tight for me right now, but I don’t see this “book” being a bible with 100 million + pages. And at my 1 year mark of RubyAMF (december 26th) I’d like to have a book pretty much written on the subject. I’m one dedicated mofo so I don’t see this being a problem.
I released a Mac OS X plugin switcher called Plugout and took it down later. We wanted to put it on a more collaborative effort site. So It will be over here. Instead of being under the RubyAMF name. Larry’s got a sweet Mac widget coming for this – hang in there.
Run this command in your terminal
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
You’ll see Star Wars in your terminal! Sorry for the random posting. Just something that was unusual.
It recently came to Larry and mine’s attention that there isn’t an easy way to switch plugins for OS X. Mike Chambers had put one out early last year, but is no longer valid as it was for PPC macs. The problem now with Intel macs is that if you install any flash player lower than 9, it is PPC so it won’t run if you open up the browser. Your browser will tell you that you don’t have have Flash installed.
This is easily fixed by opening “Get Info” on your browser and checking run in rosetta. But that is a little tedious to be switching back and forth.
So here’s a much more graceful commandline tool to automate this for you – Plugout. It’s a commandline tool that easliy let’s you switch to the target plugin, and restart the browser in rosetta (if necessary). It will work with any plugin. It comes with the Flash players 7-9 and Silverlight 1.0. But is easily extendable to add Quicktime, or RealPlayer, or whatever other plugin you want.
Plugout will be available as a Ruby gem shortly, and in the future I’d like to add support for remote updating of the plugins. But I’m not sure what kind of legal trouble this could cause. I’m sure I’ll be getting a letter from Adobe or Microsoft about even distributing the plugins up front. I’ll wait for a cease and desist.
We’re also working on GUI’s for plugout. Flash IDE and Flex Builder. And hopefully a standalone app of some sort that can be used in QA teams. For now commandline usage is simple enough for us developers. Gotta give some love to unix man.
Thanks to Larry Gordon for helping figuring out some ins and outs of how this should all work. Thanks to Larry Gordon and Alastair Green for the name plugout.
To install the tool run “sudo ./install.sh” from the commandline (inside of the plugout directory). The installer copies the plugout executable to /usr/bin and copies the plugout_plugins directory to your home directory. Refer to the homepage or ‘plugout -h’ for a how to.
Also a heads up – I haven’t had a chance to test this on a PPC Mac, so if anyone out there has a PPC mac and can test this all out that would be great!
I haven’t had any problems with spam up until now. I’m sure many have noticed the spam on the home page. It’s only hitting the home page. And I haven’t been able to get to the instiki site to look at some spam solutions because the site is down. I’ve had so many problems with Instiki – so I will officially be moving to pmwiki.
Initially I’m not going to worry about a skin for it. I just want to get rid of instiki. Skinning the wiki will probably be down on my list of things to do. But it will happen at some point. I think this is a good motivator for me to update the entire wiki. Most of the stuff people look at is out of date. Usually screencasts. Also for those who work on RubyAMF – PLEASE contribute to the wiki. Anything you want to write would probably help RubyAMF overall.
I’ll be replacing the wiki with pmwiki over the weekend. It might be down here and there, but hang in there.
I need a huge favor from someone. I need to find all the flash player 9 plugin files (/Library/Plug-Ins) For every version of flash player 9 (for PPC). The way to get all these plugins is to install players 9.0 – 9.0.60 from the archives page. After each install, go to the /Library/Plug-Ins folder and swipe the necessary flash plugins. Put them in a folder labeled 9.0.x for each version.
I can’t get them myself because I’m on an Intel mac, the PPC installers won’t install it. So please, if anyone out there has a spare 30 minutes and a PPC help me out and zip up those files on an FTP for me.
So maybe this isn’t a question you were expecting. But does anyone else have any problems with the colors / brightness on RubyAMF? This post didn’t include RubyAMF. Apparently because it’s too dark to read. Which is alright. But it makes me want to hear from more people. Should I re-skin the site to be mostly white with some red? I’m on a mac so the brightness / gamma is different and it shines for me
RubyAMF is getting to the point where it’s a great experience tying it in with Rails (and of course with Lite) – the fact that it works with scaffolding and in your controller with render :amf makes it a winner for me. But if people don’t use it because they can’t read the site then it’s time for an update. I love working on RubyAMF so I want everyone to have a great experience with it. Maybe this sounds weird – but I LOVE remoting. The first project I did with remoting was with MercuryCloud and Patrick Mineault. Ever since then it’s been a key part of almost every project I build. So I’m not trying to be pushy about RubyAMF at all, just know that everything I put into RubyAMF is pretty carefully thought out for performance factor and ease of use.
What do you think, time for a re-skin or color update?
Simeon Bateman put together a nice demo app for RailsConf to show off the power of Flex and Rails. He’s got three examples – an HTTPService example, weborb, and RubyAMF. Check them out.
